They called Proton an "emulator" though…best not to argue on what exactly Proton is right now.

Wine devs call Wine an emulator. It does emulate Windows.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShmerlThey provided everyone with everything. Their whole API was opened for anyone who wanted. The goal was to encourage collaboration, which indeed happened when enough people got together to make Vulkan from it. But not MS and Apple. They just exploited it to make their own NIHs becasue they could. It tells you everything there is to tell about their approach.

AMD disagrees with you, in Feb 2015:
https://gamingbolt.com/the-big-interview-amds-robert-hallock-on-mantle-directx-12-ps4xbox-one-free-sync-and-more [External Link]

Rashid Sayed: Switching back to Mantle once again, Intel had approached for access to API. Is there any progress on that front?


Robert Hallock: Other IHVs will receive access when we exit beta and make the API public for download. Any IHV will be able to create a Mantle solution for themselves, and it is on them to decide whether or not they want to catch up to AMD in the area of low-overhead, high-throughput and incredibly efficient graphics workloads. At this time, though, Mantle is still being privately developed by AMD and nearly 100 ISVs.

Mantle FAQ [External Link]

What are the similarities between Mantle and DirectX® 12?

​DirectX® 12 is Microsoft’s own creation, though its development has been steered by input from many different technology partners including AMD. We have welcomed the same input on Mantle by sharing the full specification with Microsoft since the early days of our API. As the industry moves to embrace the principles of “closer-to-the-metal” API design, it is evident that our pioneering work with this concept has been highly influential.​

But here, too: That's enough for me.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShmerlThat's exactly the point. Obviously AMD wanted to have one common API, not multiple NIHs. So why did MS and Apple have to rush making theirs? They could work with AMD and then Khronos on the common one.

If that was the case, they wouldn't have provided Microsoft with everyrhing on Mantle, but they did.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: F.UltraNo, no one is saying that Metal isn't better than OpenGL or OpenGL ES. The point is that Metal wasn't that much better than OpenGL or OpenGL ES […]

Says who? The difference between Metal & OpenGL are the same as Vulkan & OpenGL (potentially immense). Metal is just easier to use than Vulkan (according to developers comparing both).

Quoting: F.UltraYes and that makes it the 9% I wrote earlier. The point being that even 3 full years after the introduction 91% of app-makers still though that OpenGL ES was good enough which means that iOS didn't gain any major benefits over Android by implementing Metal. So that closes the door on "Apple was forced to implement Metal or iOS would be obsolete" that some people throw around (note that I don't accuse you of doing that, the same discussion is happening on Phoronix at the moment).

I don't get what you're calculating.

Most applications don't use any graphics library, usage is abstracted by the system. That's true for all systems, therefore already 1,7 million apps were using Metal (probably almost all).

The 9% (of all apps) must be compared to the apps that are directly using a graphics library, e.g. games. Since we don't have any numbers on that, we can only guess.

An estimate is the number of games, that's 11% (200,000) to 47% (800,000) (of all apps). So in the best case scenario 74% of all games already used Metal. Unlikely, but the adaptation would still be quite good, much better than Direct3D 12 let alone Vulkan on PC (I didn't find anything on Android).

Metal is not limited to apps. Metal is Apple's graphics API, they're using it across the whole system. Waiting another 2 or 3 years makes a huge difference for them. It's not only about performance but also efficiency, let alone developer experience.

Quoting: F.UltraSo Apple didn't _need_ Metal, they could have waited for Vulkan just like Google did. And hadn't they been so hell bent on NIH and vendor lock-in they could have spear-headed the collaborative project to replace OpenGL with a new better API, and that by all means could have been Metal.

Obviously they want to & actually control everything on their systems (from hardware to software). But waiting makes a huge difference. They release each year a new generation of hardware which is restricted by size, power & heat. In the best case scenario, Metal was like a new GPU generation, just by software.

To answer this question: The first Metal based game was released in 2014 (https://www.pocket-lint.com/games/news/131021-asphalt-8-airborne-is-first-metal-ready-game-for-ios-8-and-boy-does-it-look-lovely/ [External Link])

But think whatever you want. I know you're wrong & I've done enough to try convince you.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: F.UltraNo I have no data regarding iOS usage, Android works quite well with OpenGL ES though so I see no reason why the iPad could not have done that aswell. To me Metal is just too much NIH and an attempt to perform vendor lock-in on primarily iOS.

That's like saying Vulkan is redundant. OpenGL ES is just subset of OpenGL, it retains the flaws of the API.

Quoting: F.UltraWhat I did find however was on the Wiki on Metal that Apple announced in 2017 that 148k apps used Metal which is only 9% of the number of apps they have in their app store, so it wasn't like people where rushing out to implement it.

I haven't found concrete numbers, but there are estimates of the available games in the app store: 200,000-800,000. Even taking 800,000 as an estimate (which is unlikely when, 2022 were only 1,783,232 apps in the store, this number comes from Apple) 148,000 would be quite good.

According to Apple, more than 148,000 applications use Metal directly, and 1.7 million use it through high-level frameworks, as of June 2017

It's not limited to games but internally used everywhere.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: rustybroomhandleYou should probably read the EULA on GoG games. They are DRM free at a technical level, sure, but you are still legally limited.

What has the EULA to do with software to restrict access to your licensed software (commonly known as DRM)?

Instead of starting an unrelated discussion you could just answer my question: What can be more intrusive than blocking access to all games in the library?

/edit: I deliberately put "free" in quotes since I know that they're not without restrictions. "free" specifically refers to DRM-free (i.e. without software/mechanisms that limits access to the game).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: rustybroomhandleBy that logic, GoG also is DRM because you have to be logged in to download your games.

GOG: No, because GOG only restricts the download of the files. The game files are "free". Multiplayer through GOG Galaxy on the other hand is DRMed, that's true.

Quoting: rustybroomhandleAlso, how is that more intrusive than something than Denuvo's requirement of elevated system privileges?

What can be more intrusive than blocking access to all games in the library?

/edit: Denovo has no elevated system priviliges on Linux, does it?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Any form of DRM is bad for consumers

True, but I don't get your Denuvo hate. Steam itself is DRM, but you find it fine. And unlike Denuvo, Steam's DRM is much more invasive: it applies to all games - even when the binary itself is DRM free.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShmerlTimeline starts with Mantle which presented such ideas before Apple and MS rushed to make NIH knock offs of them. And AMD from the beginning expressed the interest to make it a common API. That's why Mantle later was turned into Vulkan. Basically, collaboration on it could have started from the beginning, if Apple and MS weren't arrogant lock-in proponents who benefit from work of others either way.

Mantle is omitted since it's the starting point for all APIs. AMD themselves provided Microsoft on everything about Mantle to develop Direct3D 12. They don't really cared about an open API, they cared about an API which would boost their GPUs.

Quoting: F.UltraYour timeline is faulty, Vulkan was first announced in July 2014 at the SIGGRAPH conference. And ofc development had been quicker if say Apple and Microsoft had decided to join the development, one cannot just ignore the massive amount of money and resources that those two have compared with Khronos.

Yes, I missed the date. But they didn't announce Vulkan, they announced that work on the next API started. A month after Apple released Metal. Khronos also has a bad history about API announcements (remember Long Peaks?).

According to some (random) opinions, Metal seems to be a just different API and easier to use than Vulkan. It's probably more of a OpenGL replacement than Vulkan, but I can't say much about that. But we know that Vulkan is hard to use.

Quoting: F.UltraAlso I don't see why waiting would have been such a problem, the first wave of games released with Metal came in 2017 anyway since everyone waited to see it stabilize first.

Can you provide a source when it was first used on iOS? Metal started on iOS where performance is much more limited. The impact of OpenGL/driver overhead is much bigger.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShmerlYour timeline is misleading. Both MS and Apple can be blamed for not supporting Vulkan. They did it very deliberately knowing it's being developed, since they did it out of obvious lock-in intent.

Are you serious? My timeline? We are talking about facts (The way it's a fact, that Apple wants to get games on macOS, because they said so). But to spell it out: Apple released Metal two years before Vulkan was released. Or in other words: To support Vulkan Apple would had to wait two whole years.

To signify how much time two years are: How successful would the Steam Deck be if players had to wait two years for any game to be playable? Steam machine ring a bell?

View this comment - View article - View full comments